Through all of my school years — elementary and high — I never had any doubt that I’d go to university. I performed well academically; I was a bookworm and all about learning and I saw no better future for myself than learning more for as long as I possibly could. My career goals changed and faded, with being a writer always staying put as the foundation, but my academic goals only did in terms of what I would study at university.

(Creative Writing either isn’t or wasn’t a college degree in Spain, and I was never that drawn to studying creative subjects, anyway. It seemed far too subjective a field to be graded on.)

Growing up, my family were a bit more financially stable than we are now; my father usually had a job and we had my grandfather living with us, helping out and funding the whims of his grandbaby, aka me. Even when times were tight, college was still in the horizon for a simple reason: scholarships.

In Spain, scholarships are given based on your level of income, and most non-medicine-related degrees have a passing grade fence, so you don’t have to try very hard to get in. Even after my mental health issues extended to physical symptoms and my average went from A to B, I wasn’t worried about getting into college. I didn’t have to write essays or pay to apply.

I like this system. I support this system. Everyone should have access to education, and scholarships are much better than loans, in my opinion. It’s great not owing tens of thousands of insert-currency-here to the government. You just had to meet certain criteria to get the money, and achieve certain low-pressure goals to keep it.

I dropped out of college three months in, bought a MacBook and a Canon camera, went back to sit two exams in September and didn’t have to give any money back. I couldn’t get another scholarship for my first year doing English in my hometown the year after that and my parents couldn’t afford one, so it’s one chance and you blow it, but that’s much better than many, many people get, and my laptop lasted me quite long and my camera — I still use it on the regular. I’m building a blog and a business with that camera.

Home after my twelve-day trip, that is. I’m still on a break from blogging. London was cold and exhausting and wonderful and full of amazing food and my best friend, and Barcelona was humid and weird and exhausting and pretty nice and full of my best friend also and there was the sea, did I mention I saw the sea? I hadn’t seen the sea (other than from a plane window) since July 30, 2008. No joke. I forgot how giddy it makes me feel.

I took loads upon loads upon loads of photos because duh, and have so much content to get up now — four restaurant reviews (soooooo much food), two hotels, three proper outfits and an outfit diary for London, the zoo, #bloggersfestival, and I’m sure I’m forgetting things.

MEANWHILE, however, I participated in a little competition Ladbrokes put together, and came up with an outfit I’d wear, hypothetically, to London Fashion Week! There’s a microsite up now where you can vote for your favorite, and you can vote for me here. Do it. DO IT. I’ve never won a voting comp, it would be nice. Plus I’ll probably be giving away the LFWend tickets since I’m not sure I can quite justify another trip to London, so hey. Double winner.

Goooo.

Back to my hiatus now, and I will (hopefully) see you in October with a brand new design! In the meantime, do follow me on Twitter and Instagram if you aren’t already.

Drumroll please… my trip is (nearly) all booked. My best friend is coming with me, and helping me bring my stuff home, and then I’m taking her to Barcelona and we’re spending the weekend so she can catch her flight back to Tallinn on Monday.

It happened really fast and I can’t believe I’m getting on a plane NEXT WEEK. We’re doing five nights instead of a full week in London to make up for the Barcelona costs — they’re necessaryish because she doesn’t want to go there alone and there are no flights to Estonia from Madrid. I’ll have six days in London because I’m reviewing a hotel my first night there, and then Annemari will join me on Friday. I’m very excited.

I’ve got two-three blog posts, a media kit and two blog designs to finish before I leave, which I think is doable given where I am with each. I just need to make a schedule, or a to-do list or something. Also, start writing down addresses and figuring out what to pack. I probably won’t be around very much once the two-three posts I’ve planned go up, so you should follow me on Twitter or Instagram! I also haven’t decided how long or in what way I’m taking September off from blogging, but it may be ‘entirely so I can focus on my rebrand,’ so there’s a chance of that. We shall see.

And now this is where I ask for things to do or see in London and especially Barcelona, because for someone who’s obsessed with the former and has always wanted to visit the latter, I’m drawing a total blank.

Yes, that deserves all the exclamation points. I could have capslocked. It is that major. I feel good now and I kid but we were approaching a disaster of suicidal proportions and that is not a joke. My mom nearly had a heart attack on Saturday, too, from all the stress. It was scary. (I kept calm and helped her through it but I also asked if I should call an ambulance something like five times.)

For ridiculous bureaucratic reasons that have only just now chosen to arise, my grandma can only stay in Valencia for three months at a time now, which means I have nine months to grow my business and save up to move somewhere lest I end up having to share a room with my sister again, a fate that rivals the apocalypse in utter direness. We are not for this. On the other hand, I always vaguely intended to jet off to Estonia next summer to be near my best friend, so the dates work out nicely.

The first day back in my room, there was cleaning and nausea and my mom had some feelings about where a nightstand should go and her being upset upset me and I ended up crying about being a failure and back in my old room again. I watched Bachelorette, which I can’t decide how I feel about and thus will forget in due time, and didn’t manage to finish an entire pizza, and slept like crap because my pillow has doubled in size — thanks, grandma! — and I didn’t feel like touching its insides.

I still haven’t, actually. I just put it on a vertical position and sleep with my head on the mattress. I napped for six hours yesterday. I was exhausted and the lorazepam helped me out there. So is the escitalopram — I stuck with it because it seemed to have an effect on my sleep schedule, and that appears to have held.

Still settling, all in all. It always takes a little while. I’m glad I have three weeks before London.

Marylebone

London: not exactly booked yet. Sort of budgeted for. I’m waiting to sort out accommodation, which may be a bit last-minute; I’m waiting to hear back from a hotel before I sort something out with someone on airbnb, if she can do my dates — we got mixed up, I think. Then I’m keeping an eye on a hostel that only asks for one week’s notice before people leave, so I can’t book anything there until late August. I’ll be there on September 4 or earlier, and stay for a week or two.

I set up an Instagram account to sell some bits and reduce the amount of luggage I bring back: it’s at lixtidies. I’m contemplating setting up a Calendly to book mini shoots. I made a Pinterest board with some ideas.

Aside from shooting, I’m taking September off. All of it. I’m blocking out August so I can wrap up all my pending projects, and I want to enjoy London. Take a lot of pictures, walk around, do some touristy shit. I may work on my rebrand; not sure about when, but probably not while I’m there.

I’ll probably only blog sporadically until October as well. It won’t be very different from my usual MO, so there’s probably no need to announce it. For once, being unreliable works in my favor. Hooray!

First of all: life, stop throwing curveballs at me. I need to save up for London. I can’t wait to go and get it over with and have a whole year to save up to go anywhere again.

Yesterday’s curveballs weren’t that bad, to be fair: a client changing her mind about a project and a troll resurfacing on Twitter. It was a lorazepam day, so I handled it fairly well, though it made me even less productive than I already was after accidentally falling asleep out of boredom waiting for my sister to leave me alone.

Sometimes — I was going to say ‘some days,’ but it’s all the days now — I think about going to London early. I’d get some cool weather, do some shoots, and be on my own. But I have responsibilities to fulfill and I can’t tell my clients, “So long, see you in two weeks!” Plus I want to be there in September for a blogger event I’m hoping to shoot. I don’t want to have all that bogging me down. I want to actually focus on shooting and have time to edit the photos at my leisure afterwards.

So I keep waiting.

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Podcasts, as y’all know, are awesome. I would like to listen to them more consistently, and maybe edit pictures while I do, or sew, because those are lovely things to do while you listen to podcasts. Unfortunately I need my room back for the latter and alone time for the former. In the meanwhile, I’m exploring the world of podcasting and booking guest spots on things. My family leave me alone to record, so that’s an upside!

My first ever podcast guest spot was on the digital scrapbooking podcast Digiscrap Geek, a weekly chat about scrapbook design and memory-keeping! We talked about capturing personality in casual, day-to-day portraiture, and it was a lot of fun. I’m embedding the audio below so you can hear me be ridiculous on the record and probably mispronounce VSCO. It’s a wonder I spelled it out instead of saying ‘vesco’ like it sounds in my head.

And you can see the show notes here. Let me know what you think! But only if it’s good. I’m fragile.

I still want to launch my own podcast on a topic related to my blog/biz, but I don’t have time (alone) right now, so yesterday I had this grandiose idea of doing a mini biweekly thing where I read my poems and then try to analyze them. Or explain them. Or explain what was going through my head when I wrote them. The way I write poetry, I really don’t put meaning into it; I make it up afterwards. So it would be fun to read a poem and analyze it in the following episode, giving listeners (if there are any?!) a chance to interpret it on their own! Could have guests as well. It’s a silly idea but I think it would be fun and pressure-free, and not necessarily indefinite.

Thoughts on that?

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My other two business thoughts:

1. Stock licensing. Maybe instead of licensing photos one by one, I could have a monthly membership library that would give holders a simple license to use my photos for individual blog posts or websites, and they could choose to purchase further licensing if they needed the photos for print, books or advertising campaigns. Need to separate a bit there, but I want to profit more if they’re profiting more, essentially. But I like the library concept a lot.

2. Referral scheme. I was working this out in one of my Facebook groups and they suggested giving affiliates (or… referrers? What IS the difference?) a personalized discount code. That way clients would be less likely to forget to mention who referred them. And the affiliate would get 5% of the sale in cash OR 10% in design credit.

Thoughts on any of these? Would you buy access to the stock photo library/refer people to me? I mean, they sound like good ideas, right?

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Do you listen to podcasts? Which are your favorites? When do you normally listen, and what do you do while you listen?

Anxiety has been a companion of mine for a good long, long decade. It’s hard to think of a time when it wasn’t pushing its way through the crevices of my brain and knocking on my temples like a five-year-old child going, “Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. Oi! Pay attention to me.”

In that time, I’ve tried a sizable amount of techniques and attempted to build habits; I’ve been hesitant to use medication and refused completely and gone back around to ‘yes, let’s’; I’ve accumulated a long list of shit that doesn’t work — much of which makes me angry, too — and a much shorter list of shit that works — well, sometimes.

Sometimes still beats never, so I’m going to share those things that make living with anxiety a little easier on me.

Well, we’re due one of these. I was going for Sunday and hoping to have a normal post up yesterday, but that didn’t happen, and here’s why:

It is hot as shit.

In case you’re unfamiliar with my deep and intense hatred of summer in Spain, I’ll remind you of two things:

1) How much I complain about it. On Twitter, Instagram, in response to other people, in real life, on this here blog, did I mention on Twitter? Yeah.

2) I moved to London last year in spring so I could escape this hell, and my most defeatist plans for coming back home weren’t supposed to go into motion until September.

Also, I have a half-written post about how to survive summer in Spain. I don’t know if I’ll post it, but item #1 is: Spend it somewhere else. Item #10 is: Seriously, I hear Siberia’s nice this time of year.

In short: I fucking hate summer.

Fortunately, or neutrally, or the opposite of fortunately let’s be real, it was so unbearable that it made work impossible, so I broke down and bought an electric fan. This was a trade-off not only in the sense that someone took my money and traded it for a thing that blows air on me, thereby returning the ability to think to my brain, but also in the sense that I’m not the only person in this house who’s basically dying in this weather, and I’m also not enough of an asshole to tell my mom to go become a puddle of sweat somewhere else. (I have fewer qualms about telling my sister this, sometimes.)

So there’s another obstacle to work. I’m managing today because my sister’s meeting friends. My mom napped here and it was eh, okay, and then I kicked her out at 8 PM, which wasn’t that cruel. I wanted to write and it was fine when she was sleeping, but when people use gadgets behind me, it drives me up the wall. And I have enough concentration issues as it is.

What all this means is the same thing I’ve been saying since I moved here: I have got to get up early so I can enjoy the patio while there’s still a breeze. I’m never more productive than the two hours after I get out of the shower, and I can’t use them if I spend them in my room because as soon as the electric fan goes on, somebody invades.

But hey, at least I can think again. Near my laptop, even. This weekend was bad for me and my laptop. I went near it and went ‘arghhhh’ and stepped away.

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One of the things I can do is keep taking the Skillshare class I’m taking on surface pattern design. I’m learning loads about Illustrator, you guys, I recommend it. The more I learn about it, the more it doesn’t look that different from Photoshop. Isn’t that lovely? Yes it is.

Even lovelier is the fact that they approved my scholarship request, which means I can continue to take classes for a year without paying for it. I love that they took me at my word and gave me the chance to keep using the site and my respect for them has basically increased tenfold knowing the scholarship program is legit.

I just need some time to play* with my skills without money on the line, you know? Learning is thrilling and creativity and art are joyful and I miss them not being so tied up to client work. I want to work on more passive income streams, but I also want to have something structured to do that I don’t have to feel guilty or stressed about. So I’m very excited about this.

* They also didn’t revoke my scholarship after I used this line in my thank-you email preceded by the sentence, “In the immortal words of Avril Lavigne,” so extra bonus points to them.

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I’m also excited about all the posts I want to write for the blog. I feel like I should work on my rebrand first, but maybe I could set a goal of posts scheduled and written before I do that? If I’m doing three per week, and rebranding will take me maybe two months in between client work, let’s say — 24? Damn, that’s a lot. Doable, though! For sure. I have fourteen posts outlined and one in my head already anyway. This should be fun.

The picture in my head is becoming clearer, as far as content at least. It’s scary because it’s a little different from every blog I follow, so I don’t have any people I can clearly use as a guideline. I’m not comfortable breaking molds, me, I like to transform them mainly. But it’s finally coming together and hopefully it will work out.

One of the posts I’ve outlined is about rom coms, so media, which is something I want to do more writing about. It’s my first passion and I feel like going back to my roots. I’m not sure if I’ll do it mostly for this blog or find a gig somewhere else, but I’m finding myself finally wanting to watch things — movies and TV, not just John Oliver and gymnastics on youtube — again, and that makes me happy.

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Finally, I’m guesting on a podcast on Thursday! It’s a small one but it looks like it’s full of lovely people and I’m SO excited to get some experience with that. The podcast is Digiscrap Geek and I’ll be talking about how to capture personality in portraiture.

Trichotillomania, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is also called “hair-pulling disorder,” which gives you a good generic idea of what it entails. Essentially, it’s a compulsion to tear out your own hair. It is often caused by anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it kind of sucks.

I’d been struggling with it for two years before I knew there was a name for it, and this fall it will be eight years since it started — during what I now consider my first proper depressive episode.

My trichotillomania is focused on my eyebrows, with occasional detours towards my eyelashes and nose hair. There’s something satisfying about tugging at something and having it come out, and once I start, I have a lot of trouble stopping — even though I feel pretty gross right from the get-go.

I already wrote about my history with it. It’s one of my most popular Google Search posts, but it only covers up to two years ago. My year in London caused pretty major changes to the way I saw my eyebrows, so I thought an update was in order.

I’m still going to sleep early. Getting up has been a bit hard the past two days, but I’m going to blame it on my period and this awful weather that’s messed up my patio routine. It looks like I’ll be back complaining about the heat again in no time, though. I switched to coated escitalopram, which doesn’t make me want to vomit first thing in the morning. Still taking lorazepam every other day, still makes a significant difference.

Sharing a room and a bed with my sister fluctuates between “I’ll live” and “unbearable, but I have to live.”

Progressing apace with the portfolio design for my friend Bethany — can’t wait to show it off, because I used my new Bamboo Pad for the logo, and I’m learning so much about Squarespace since she agreed to be my guinea pig for the platform — and got a couple of other things in the works. One should have been done two weeks ago, but at least I’ve got a massive tiny-task list now.

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2. Blog Networks

I’ve had Social Fabric bookmarked for a while — I think I was waiting for them to open applications, in which case, you should head over there before they close up again! I was approved, which surprised me, but hey, I’m not going to complain about that. These are the Collective Bias people, and at the moment the “shoppertunities” I see are past the deadline for applying, but bloggers I respect regularly participate in their campaigns and I’m excited to be a part of the network.

While I was there, I also applied to Pollinate again, but I’m about halfway to their minimum pageview number, so I doubt they’ll let me in. It was worth a shot, anyway. Not nearly as complicated an application as the one for Everyday Feminism I’m eying.

I’m always talking about running e-courses and writing e-books, and yesterday I thought, you know what, Skillshare has a free trial, and they have calligraphy courses, and why not. So I think I’m going to give them a go. I also applied for one of their scholarships because I am still below the poverty line and if I don’t have to struggle to pay for this, well, it would be nice. (It’s also most likely the only way I’d sign up, short of taking one month, signing up for everything, hoarding all the materials, and never going back. Which, while probably legal, is not ideal.)

I should also look into business plans and all these other things I keep saying I’m going to do and then don’t because I have no one to hold me to my promises.

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4. Plans

I may have made a breakthrough re: going back to London this summer. Scarlett‘s September #bloggersfestival is on September 5, and I would love to go. So I’m starting to think about PRs to contact, because it would be cool to do a bit of a tour and get some travel content aside from shooting editorial/TF (and portraits if anyone wants to hire me!). I’m still pondering the possibility of a crowdfunder — I don’t think I’ll need that much, but it would be good to not have to worry about anything.

Basically, I have that event, I have to shoot some things for a client and return them, and I’d like to sell some of my stuff before I bring it back. That brings up some issues in the form of “maybe you shouldn’t be gallivanting around the country if you have a ton of shit to carry,” but I’m also looking at inviting plus ones to anything I get outside of London, if I can get anything — for photo assistance, for car assistance, and for the company and all that nice stuff.

So I don’t know. It’s a nice thing to think about, that’s all. I really want to put my 50 mm to good use before the weather gets really crappy over there. And I want to enjoy a bit of travel. That’s not so bad, is it? And if I can bring my sister with me, that will be a huge help with luggage. So. There’s that too.

So my external hard drive is completely dead. Dead and gone. Apparently getting someone to do data recovery on it would run me something in the vicinity of 900€. Which I don’t have, and if I did I’d be making my plans to return to London for a month this summer. Which I’m not. So I’m keeping the external in the event of a miracle, but for now that means I’ve lost some shoots that were so, so dear to me, like one I did with my friend Bethany and a model in Hampstead Heath, and one I did with another model, and all the photos from my long, long walk down Belsize Lane to South Hampstead, which are some of my favorite shots I’ve ever taken, and I always intended to post under the heading Fairytale of Belsize Park.

I found the August 30 shoots with Leigh (there was more than this part) and Emma (here) on a USB stick, and the shoots I did for Pixiebell on another, and there’s a lot on my laptop. I can also get back some of the 50mm shots, because I erase my camera card so infrequently I still have photos from a week before I left London in there (and from the week I left: thank god). But the losses sting a fair bit. I’m still taking it really well, considering, and I’m just going to chalk that up to the antidepressant and lack of money stressors crushing me at the moment.

2. Antidepressants

Day 23 of escitalopram: I took a nap. As usual, I’m groggy and disgruntled and a bit off. Naps are bad for you, kids. It just felt so good to lie in bed with my cat on my legs. One of the things I’m most looking forward to about getting my room back is switching which awful creature I sleep with. My cat >>>>>>>>>> my sister, as bed partners go. My sister’s allergic, so “both” is not an option.

At least I ate before I napped. My appetite issues are still very real and very there. Every few days there’s one where I can’t stomach anything and end up asking my mom (shut up) to make me a fruit salad. She hates when I don’t have my meals, so they’re very serious fruit salads, and they go down well, but being nauseous at the thought of food all day long isn’t pleasant. And yesterday was one of those days.

The thing the escitalopram seems to be really helping with is my sleep schedule. Two weeks ago, I made a goal of getting up before 2 PM every day and finished with flying colors. This week, it was before 1 PM, and once again it was a smashing success. This week I’m going for before noon, and so far it’s going really well. And at night, I’m tired and just pass out sometime between midnight and 2 AM. It isn’t always smooth — some days I wake up every time my sister gets up to snack, or get her inhaler, or whatever the fuck it is she has to turn the light on for — or I can’t get to sleep in an age, and this morning I had a murder nightmare, but it’s progress.

Now I need to get up even earlier because my patio is unbearable from 12:30 on and I need a few hours to get a grip and get things done here.

3. Work

Work has been weird. For all that I’m getting up earlier, it hasn’t translated into productivity. I think in the entire week, I designed a media kit, did some admin, wrote three blog posts (one is a Travelodge review going up tomorrow), and indulged a lot in organizing files. And bookmarks. And Evernote. And my blog categories. I have a couple of new projects I’m excited to work on, but I’m waiting for payments and questionnaires and whatnot, which is always kind of nerve-wracking.

Mostly I’ve just been tired. I don’t know if it’s the heat, or the fact that I’m getting up earlier — if it’s the latter, I’ll probably get used to it. I have a burst of mild energy after I shower, and I often lose it because it’s already too hot to work in the patio and I can’t work in my sister’s room with her sleeping there.

4. Plans

I can’t make any. It’s outrageous, honestly. I don’t feel ready to go back to the UK at all, but I’m also really excited to be able to do some editorial shoots, maybe, without worrying about getting paid, so… I don’t know. I’m vaguely thinking about getting my photography portfolio together and running a crowdfunding campaign again, but I have no idea if anyone would buy a shoot from me. That’s what I’d be doing really, pre-selling shoots. There really won’t be any issue if one of my work projects doesn’t fall through, but anyway. There’s a thought.

Have also vaguely considered putting up a list of all the post ideas I have and letting other people pick the order in which I do them… and maybe challenge myself to see how many posts I’m physically capable of putting together in a day? Would anyone want to play along with me? On Twitter or something? Maybe I should do it properly, like Paper & Oats’s Batch Day. I don’t know!

I did set up a mailing list, but I haven’t added subscription boxes anywhere. I want to send out a monthly newsletter with cool links and portfolio updates and maybe exclusive goodies or advice. Haven’t fully laid it all out yet. But while I’m here, let’s test it. I set up forms for Nirvana Cakery, but she had a plugin and I’m not totally sure how this all works yet.